Abbot Paul’s great building was imposing, but it was not beautiful. What is left of his original work has become venerable through age, but there can be no doubt that, could we see it in all its freshness, as it was built, we should consider it very gaunt and ugly indeed. He antedated the typical American in his desire to “lick creation,” and he thought in feet and yards, rather than in terms of beauty. There was much to provoke him to this. He had the relics of the then holiest indigenous martyr, and those of St. Amphibalus, scarcely less holy, in his charge, and ready to his hand lay huge piles of building materials, the bricks, tiles, and stones of the ruined Roman city of _Verulamium_, that had stood in the valley. The bulk of these materials was formed of tiles, and with these the abbot reared his walls and piers, and the central tower, bedding the tiles in mortar as thick as themselves: so that to modern observers it seems remarkable that, with such a pudding-like mass as this must have been before it dried out, the walls ever consented to stand upright. Some few ornamental features were incorporated from the Saxon church built by Offa, King of the Mercians, in A.D. 793. These are the celebrated balusters, of undoubted Saxon character, which, fitted with Norman capitals and bases, serve as columns in the triforia of the transepts. Abbot Paul’s building was of the most stark and naked early Norman character. He willingly forswore ornament, if he could thereby add another bay to the length of his Abbey Church, and he and the mid-nineteenth-century builders join hands, in the spirit, across the tremendous gap of seven centuries and a half. Both delighted in plaster, and both hated to show the real materials of which they built. Abbot Paul covered the entire exterior of his Abbey, as well as the interior, from east to west, and up to the topmost battlements of his central tower, with plaster, thick and slab, and thought the result beautiful. And so did his contemporaries. We may take leave to look with a considerable measure of contempt upon their taste. Traces of the plaster facing of the tower, indeed, remained until 1870, when, in course of restoration works, it was removed, revealing the beautiful dark red hue of the Roman tiles of which it is constructed. [Sidenote: _A COSTLY ENTERPRISE_]